Mar 29, 2009

This presentation by John Chambers at MIT took place on October 15th, 2008. Cisco continues to be a very interesting company to watch and learn from.
You’ll need some popcorn when you watch this video but key areas that I found amazing include:

Cisco is evolving into a collaborative enterprise utilizing web 2.0 and social networking which allows them to scale, increase productivity and speed to market

They focus on market transitions and listen to customers more then what the competition is doing.

Typically they have a 3 to 5 year vision of where they are going, and a 2 to 4 sustainable differentiation advantage with a 12-18 month execution timeframe

They apply “architecture” thinking to every market transition and opportunity they choose to go after. This opens their minds to new ways to tie things together to solve key industry problems

There’s a lot to this video, but I’ll stop here. I’ve put a timeshift timeline for those that may want to fast forward to sections of interest. This video has been shared from MIT's site.

This presentation would be a great supplement to any business course in the accredited online schools. There are additional resources that may be useful.

2:25 Recession now but plan for the recovery
6:48 The future of countries, companies and jobs
9:00 What Cisco does well
10:45 Next Market Transition – Collaboration
13:41 Phase II of the Internet
15:30 Why invest in Information Technology today?
17:30 Cisco changes organizational structure, culture and hierarchy
21:00 Cisco’s transition to a collaborate enterprise
22:00 Focus on architecture when addressing market transition; importance of cross functional collaboration
25:00 I-Prize competition (shameless self promotion: my team was one of the 12 finalists, here’s an overview of what the experience was like for me)
27:30 New public/private partnerships will become more prevalent and important
30:00 Web 2.0 is taking off at Cisco
33:30 Collaboration, Cisco’s definition
34:12 Future Growth…framework for tracking Cisco’s priorities
34:30 Increasing importance of Corporate Social Responsibility
35:18 The new definition of capitalism
36:30 Cisco’s experience working with China
41:00 Closing remarks and Q&A